Friday, December 2, 2011

How Atheists Achieve Immortality

He kicked the log. A few coals rolled out. He pushed them back. He said:

"I often think he's the only one of us who's achieved immortality. I don't mean in the sense of fame and I don't mean that he won't die some day. But he's living it. I think he is what the conception really means. You know how people long to be eternal. But they die with every day that passes. When you meet them they're not what you met last. In any given hour, they kill some part of themselves. They change, they deny, they contradict-- and they call it growth. At the end there's nothing left, nothing unreversed or unbetrayed; as if there had never been any entity, only a succession of adjectives fading in and out on an unformed mass. How do they expect a permanence which they have never held for a single moment? But Howard-- one can imagine him existing forever."

"What I've always thought, was a sentence from a Greek philosopher-- I don't, unfortunately, remember who it was-- that I read at sixteen, and it's affected me all my life: I will not die. It's the world that will end." -Ayn Rand